Experimental Blog #58

Comments on "Molotov's Magic Lantern - Travels in Russian History" by Rachel Polonsky

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, who, in 1937 and 1938, signed execution lists, along with Joseph Stalin and others, that included the names of 43,569 people; party members, sometimes their wives, and others considered "wreckers"; and who also approved along with the rest of the Politburo, the massacre of the entire Polish officer corps, about 22,000 men, in the Katyn forest in March of 1940, was expelled from the central committee of the USSR Comunist Party in 1957. Nonetheless, he continued to live in a fine appartment in Moscow for another 29 years until 1986.
Molotov's real family name was Skryabin, a well known musical family, and, elsewhere, it says that he had some kind of degree in Fine Arts.
Molotov seems to have been largely overlooked in America, but this author, Rachel Polonsky, reveals the importance of his long life, he was born in 1890, and, perhaps, the importance of his intellectual interests as well. Rachel Polonsky thinks that he had a personal library of as many as 10,000 books before he was thrown out of the party leadership.
Between 1969 and 1986, Molotov was interviewed by the "Stalinist poet", Felix Chuev, who published these " 140 conversations" in 1991.
Molotov also has a grandson, Vyacheslav Nikonov, who, besides being a specialist in American history, is writing a multi-volume biography of his grandfather.
The "riddles, mysteries, and enigmas" of this vastly complicated country, Russia, and its communist history are very much illuminated and explained by this book.